Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,7
Blighty; Killaweed; Sykes’s Bag Balm – keeps teats as soft as silk; Immunol Organic Lime Compound; various discarded medicated licks – they didn’t work, but he can’t quite bring himself to throw them out; Calcijec for milk fever and grass tetany; Fumoflake calcium cyanide for gassing rabbit burrows; a copy of The Right Way! by John Roy Stewart, a veterinary book on how to treat the disease and how to perform the operation; numerous unread reports of milk, butter and cream equalisation and stabilisation schemes; and a flyer promoting a screening of Egg Petersen’s colour film, No Hand Stripping, held at the Cohuna Mechanics Institute four years ago.
The forecast says some stratocumulus moving over at times from the north, but it should fine up nicely later on, it should give Harry a clear run at fixing the fence in the channel paddock. He starts the vacuum pump on the milking machine, rinses the glass observation bowl and tensions the inflations. The first cows trot forwards into the bails. Licker and Big Joyce are jostling for their place in line. Harry hears their hooves skittering on the bricks. He looks up from taking the cups off Stumbles to see Licker with her head down shoving Big Joyce out of the way. Licker often has a large mood on her. The top cows and the bottom cows are not the problem – it’s the middle classes that are always jockeying for position, trying to better themselves and knocking each other about in the process. Harry is careful not to pet a middle cow – even the smallest attention and she’ll be high-hatting her sisters and become even more unmanageable. Joyce takes the shove at the worst place – just below the hips where she’s not very stable, where the weight of her udder is already pulling her off-balance. Her knees splay out from under her; she teeters pathetically on the edges of her hooves. Licker trots smartly through the gap and shoves her head into the trough to feed.
‘Really, girls,’ Harry says. ‘Is that really necessary?’
He moves smoothly between each cow, going backwards and forwards into the engine room, checking the separator. When the rhythm of the milking is well underway he lets his mind wander. Harry entertains himself with the idea that the girls are a troupe – perhaps dancers or singers – and that he is their manager, responsible for their myriad complex travel arrangements and costumes and meals. They are on some sort of vague world tour where they are much acclaimed for their talent and beauty. Harry is a dedicated but exasperated manager, worn down by attending to all of their feminine needs and foibles. He’s responsible too for their reputations. When Babs leaves the stalls at unexplained speed, her empty udder slapping slackly between her legs, he watches after her and feels ashamed on her behalf, hoping nobody has seen his good girl with her bloomers showing. Harry shakes his head and finishes rinsing the udder in his hands – the tight bag of a milker in her first lactation. Four cows to go now. The pump is chugging along warmly. Harry wonders what grand city they are in today. He sees bold headlines in foreign newspapers, imagines them being met in the foyers of expensive hotels. The sound of their breathing falls into line with the pulse of the cups inflating. Harry is their conductor – he’s at the centre of an orchestra of pistons, lungs and udders. The cows provide the wheezy melody, the milking machine bashes along underneath with its regular motorised beat. It’s Harry’s music-de-milk and the dawn is only just breaking.
As he washes the buckets out Harry sees Tiny admiring her reflection in the wing mirror of the Waratah. She sits perched on the handlebars turning her head from side to side in front of the glossy circle. Tiny is the smallest, most dim-witted member of the family of kookaburras that live on Harry’s farm. Nearly all well-run dairy farms with their irrigation channels and fertile pastures, their thick shelterbelts to protect the cows from wind and rain, can attract enough insects, lizards, frogs and small birds to support a kookaburra family. Harry and Michael keep a weather eye on the kookaburras. They are brash and rowdy, more like dogs than birds. Tiny hammers her beak into the mirror. The force of it knocks the bike from its stand and it clatters to the ground. Tiny, startled, flies away so hurriedly one